German-American Discourse on Politics and Culture

April 28, 2011

Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) is a far-right student organization complete with its own swastika-like symbol. The group has achieved some notoriety recenly by inviting well-known racists to speak at several American college campuses. The Southern Poverty Law Group has identified YWC as a hate organization:

The Leadership Institute has a history of backing radical right student groups. In 2006 college-aged Leadership Institute-trained activists began reviving and radicalizing chapters of the Young Americans for Freedom at universities across the country, including MSU. DeAnna is the former leader of the Virginia State University chapter of YAF.

One of YVC's leaders, Taylor Rose, has shown a strong interest in reaching out like-minded Europeans, forming a trans-Atlantic alliance of hate and intolerance. He writes in a recent blog post:

All across Europe, the fires of conservatism are spreading throughout the continent and into the very homes and lives of people once duped by atheistic socialism. A new order is taking shape, where Europeans are again affirming that it is Christianity that is the foundation of Western Civilization and the Bible as our cornerstone of order. Europeans are beginning to understand that if we remove Jesus and supplant him with Marx or Muhammad all that we are left with is narcissism and barbarism.

But young Rose is putting action behind his words and actually traveled to Antwerp to meet with the extremist group Vlaams Belang and member of the German Pro-Bewegung:

In early April, Rose also met in Antwerp with members of the far-right Belgian political party Vlaams Belang at one of the party’s congresses. He was photographed there with members of PRO NRW (NRW means North Rhineland-Westphalia, a German state) and PRO Köln (City of Cologne), both of which are classified as “right-wing extremist” by German authorities. Members of the far-right anti-immigration and anti-Islamic German Pro-Bewegung (Pro-Motion) movement were also in attendance.

April 26, 2011

Fascinating piece by Johannes Groschupf in Die Zeit on the historical background of Hans Fallada's 1947 novel Jeder stirbt für sich allein, translated into English as Alone in Berlin (read my review of the German original here). Falladas last novel, published just months before his death, became a surprise international bestseller last year in France, the UK, and in Israel, and a new unexpurgated edition is now being published by Aufbau Verlag in Berlin.

Fallada's suspenseful novel deals with an act of resistance against Nazi terrof by a middle-age couple in wartime Berlin. Fallada named his couple Otto and Anna Quangel, but the novel is based on the actual Gestapo file on Otto und Elise Hampel. The Hampels were turned into the police by a neighbor and were executed in Plötzensee in 1943.

Groschupf visits the neighborhood in Wedding where the Hampels lived and finds a few survivors who vividly recall the couple. The apartment building, so vividly described by Fallada, no longer exists:

("In November 1943 the building was hit by a bomb," Frau Quass continued. There were 96 fatalities. The building burned for weeks. The custodian's family was among the victims. It was the only building in the area that was bomb, and right away people started saying that that Frau Hampel had cursed the building, and that was why it was bombed. The rubble stood there for years. When a new structure was being constructed a worker fell from the scaffolding and again people spoke about the curse." Frau Quass never forgot her neighbors. "I always remember the Hampels on April 8, since that is when they died.")

Fallada's Jeder stirbt für sich allein is a work of fiction, though it is based on a true story. It turns out that the most gripping section of the novel, the trial of Otto and Anna Quangel - a total travesty of justice - was more fiction than fact. While the Quangels are defiant to the end, the real-life Hampels were far less heroic, blaming each other for the "treasonous" activities in a futile effort to avoid the guillotine.

And Groschupf provides another detail: Fallada initially balked at writing the novel since he himself had not openly resisted the Nazis: he felt unworthy as a writer. Fortunately, Fallada overcame these scruples and gave us the best novel about everyday life in Berlin under Nazi rule.

April 23, 2011

I never realized until recently that there is a sub-culture of libertarian "philosophers" and scholars that have their own "institutes" and meet regularly at conferences around the world to discuss the dangers of "fractional reserve banking", the need to return to the gold standard, the principles of Austrian Economics, etc. This alternate universe is comprised principally of economists and scholars from third-rate colleges and state universities whose "theories" were generally ignored - until recently, that is. With the rise of the Tea Party movement in the US, some of their ideas are entering the political mainstream.

The foremost authority of Austrian Economics in the US (despite its name, this is primarily an American school) is a German-American professor, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. An interview with Professor Hoppe - The Mind of Hans-Hermann Hoppe - was recently published on the Web site of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. In the interview, Hoppe discusses his core beliefs -which are evidently the foundation of the Austrian school: the evils of democracy and superiority of monarchy, the cult of private property, the need for the gold standard. Egalitarian thinking is the greatest evil of modern society; tribal structures and clans such as existed in the Dark Ages are to be emulated and supported as much as possible:

HOPPE: I don't think that we, in the Western world, can go back to clans and tribes. The modern, democratic state has destroyed clans and tribes and their hierarchical structures, because they stood in the way of the state's drive toward absolute power. With clans and tribes gone, we must try it with the model of a private law-society that I have described. But wherever traditional, hierarchical clan and tribe structures still exist, they should be supported; and attempts to "modernize" "archaic" justice systems along Western lines should be viewed with utmost suspicion.

In another interview - this one in German published in the Schweizer Monatshefte - Professor Hoppe elaborates on his antipathy towards democracy:

(Yes, of couse democracy is directly or indirectly a form of communism. A majority decides what belongs to you or to me, what you and I may or may not do. That has nothing to do with private property, but a great deal to do with the relativization of property, that is with common property, in other words communism;)

In the interview Hoppe goes on to praise Switzerland for being less democratic than other European countries and for its efforts to exclude non-Swiss from its soil He also praises the right-wing extremist politician and millionaire Christoph Blocher for his anti-immigrant policies, lamenting that "we could never have a politician like Blocher in the US. "

But, as Hoppe has written elsewhere, he is all in favor of immigration - as long as the immigrants are (white) Europeans with superior intelligence and education:

More specifically, it means distinguishing strictly between "citizens" (naturalized immigrants) and "resident aliens" and excluding the latter from all welfare entitlements. It means requiring as necessary, for resident alien status as well as for citizenship, the personal sponsorship by a resident citizen and his assumption of liability for all property damage caused by the immigrant. It implies requiring an existing employment contract with a resident citizen; moreover, for both categories but especially that of citizenship, it implies that all immigrants must demonstrate through tests not only (English) language proficiency, but all-around superior (above-average) intellectual performance and character structure as well as a compatible system of values – with the predictable result of a systematic pro-European immigration bias;

So, in his Liberatarian order, Hoppe would exclude the non-Europeans, since they can never be part of what he labels "the natural elite" - whose innate superiority is passed along genetically from generation to generaion:

In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn with their conflicts and complaints against each other.

We know who these Herrenmenschen are. They are the rightful property owners in Hoppe's Libertarian order. There can be no room for those of inferior genes - or, "sexual deviants", homosexuals, etc:

There can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They-the advocates of alternative, non-family-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism-will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

Once we have rounded up the hippies and the gays, there is one more group that Hoppe would eliminate, since he despises them most of all:

"There can be no tolerance toward democrats ... in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society."

All of this would be laughable - after all, the anarchist and anti-statist Hoppe is an employee of the state of Nevada, and he able to publish whatever he wishes thanks to the freedoms offered by the federally enshrined US constitution he hates - but increasingly we see these ideas expressed in mainsstream politics. We see Hoppe's racist and anti-immigrant ideas in the rhetoric of the Tea Party. We see his concept of the "natural elites" expressed in the policies of the Republican party - which has renamed them "job creators" who must not be taxed or restricted in any way in their dirve to accumulate wealth. And we see it in the general ridicule of the concept of the common good, which leads to drive to wreck or privatize all public institutions. Hans-Hermann Hoppe can watch with some satisfaction as the democratic experiment in America slowly collapses.

April 22, 2011

The German Social Democrats (SPD) demonstrated yesterday once again why they keep losing ground to the Green Party by allowing best-selling author and "gene expert" Thilo Sarrazin to remain in its ranks. The whole "procedure" was rather preposterous as the SPD leadership formally accepted Sarrazin's lame apology:

The politician wrote that he did not intend with his book to express either "social Darwinist theories" or a "selective population policy." He said it was also not his intention to discriminate against particular groups or immigrants. "To the contrary, with my theses, I wanted to promote the integration of migrant groups who because of their origin, social background or religion were not prepared or in a situation to integrate more strongly," Sarrazin wrote. "At no point did I have the intention of violating Social Democratic principles with my theories," he added. "If members of the party feel that I have impaired their understanding of Social Democracy, then I regret that, even if it is my opinion that my book did not do so on any occasion."

The idea that the inflammatory book Deutschland schafft sich ab promotes integration is absurd. The pseudo-scientific "proof" of the inferior intelligence of immigrants, which Sarrazin takes great pains to document with numerous footnotes - giving the book a phony veneer of academic rigor - is totally inconsistant with the ideals and traditions of social democracy in Germany. I agree with the editorial published in Die Zeit:

(There are boundaris that a party may not cross. When the Christian Democrat Martin Hohmann resorted to anti-Semitic rhetoric in 2003, Angela Merkel as party chairperson made the correct decision: she forced him out of the party. Sarrazin too has done more than just shoot his mouth off. He has based differences in human intelligence on genetic factors In doing so he has come too close to most dangerous false theories of the 20th century. Therefore the SPD would be correct in forcing him out. )

The neo-Nazi NPD had it right when they celebrated the publication of Sarrazin's book:

April 20, 2011

Surminski covers familiar territory in his 1989 novel Grunowen: oder das vergangene Leben (Grunowen or the Past Life) - namely, the lost territory of his native East Prussia. A better subtitle might have been "You Can't Go Home Again".

Werner Tolksdorf is a widower in a west German city who is out of sorts after retiring from a career as legal counsel for a multinational corporation. Out of the blue he is invited to the 80th birthday celebration of a cerntain Felix Malotka and suddenly Tolksdorf is confronted with his own past. Werner Tolksdorf was born and raised on a large estate owned by his family in the Masurian Lake District of the former East Prussia. Felix Malotka had been the longtime coachman and loyal servant to Tolksdorf's father. For over forty years Tolksdorf had buried all memories of his home village of Grunowen, and knew nothing about the circumstances of his father's death other than that he had died as the war was ending in 1945 ("Bei Kriegsende umgekommen" was the official announcement). When he meets Malotka at his birthday party the memories began to flood back and Tolksdorf talks the old man into taking a road trip back to the old estate- now part of Poland.

But Grunowen is just a ghost town; the last Germans had vanished years before, and the only remaining resident is a mute fisherman who builds bonfires with the books from the library of the ruined Tolksdorf Schloss. Still, through the stories and reminiscence of Felix Malotka, Tolksdorf is reconnected with his vergangenes Leben and learns the shocking truth about his father.

As in Jokehnen and his other novels, Surminski is masterful in capturing the haunting beauty of the lakes and forests of Masuria. The land is eternal whether in the hands of Poland, Russia or Germany.

April 16, 2011

The United States Senate has released a scathing bi-partisan report on the origins of the global financial crisis that plunged the US and world economies into the worst recession since the 1930s. The 650 page report - Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Crisis - can be downloaded (warning: pdf) here. The report in partcular singles out two financial institutions - Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank - for reckless, unethical and, in my opinion, criminal activities which disrupted capital markets around the globe and exacerbated the crisis as it unfolded. The Deutsche Bank "Case Study" can be found on pp. 330 - 374, and makes for fascinating reading. The Case Study , documented with interviews with the principals and e-mails sent by Deutsche Bank, provides an inside view of the banks CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) juggernaut that earned the bank $billions in fees while sticking global investors with high-risk junk securities which quickly became totally worthless.

At the heart of the Case Study is a $5 billion dollar short position Deutsche Bank built against the very securities it was aggressively selling to its institutional client base. E-mails document how the bank's chief CDO trader - Greg Lippmann - convinced Deutsche Bank's senior management to build the short position, even has he called his group's activities "a giant ponzi scheme". That short position netted Deutsche Bank $1.5 billion in profits, as the subprime market began to tank. The $5 billion short was so successful that a trader who worked for Deutsche Bank even wrote a song about it. It's called "CDO Oh Baby," and it's set to the Vanilla Ice song.

Is Lippmann sitting in prison together with that other notorious ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff? Hardly. Greg Lippmann left Deutsche Bank last year to start LibreMax Capital LLC, an investment firm based in New York.

Left out of the report is how Deutsche Bank set up another lucrative business during the crisis - serving as trustee for its own CDOs as well as for Goldman's and others'. In that line of business, Deutsche Bank has earned $millions in fees by foreclosing on commercial and residential properties in the US - forcing tens of thousands of Americans from their homes. The bank has used its position as America's Foreclosure King to acquire properties at fire-sale prices and selling these at a profit to other real estate investors.

April 14, 2011

The journalist and self-proclaimed "Islam expert" Dr. Udo Ulfkotte recently outlined his proposal for mass deportation and forced repatriation of the Turkish and Arab immigrants in Germany in order to create more space (Lebensraum) for "ethnic Germans" (i.e. Aryans). But, as it turns out, these measures are totally unneccesary. There has been a net outflow of (predominantyl young) immigrants from Germany. Why should they remain in a country where they are not welcome? Moreover, the xenophobia propogated by Ulkfotte and opportunistic politicians is keeping much-needed talent out of Germany. This was the conclusion of the Expert Council on Integration and Migration (Sachverständigenrats Integration und Migration (SVR)):

(In the past 15 years Germany lost half a million more people to foreign countries than it was able to attract. These are people in their peak earning ages, who on the average were more qualified that the German workforce as a whole. Of those who left for other European countries, 49% had college degrees compared with only 29% of the popluation.)

("Sarrazin has ruined the attitude towards Germany among immigrants", said the well-known immigration researcher Klaus J. Bade. But Sarrazin's statements have also had a negative impact on Germany's attraction to those outside the country. "Sarrazin has given Germany a double self-goal", said Bade. From our surveys we are able to diagnose a definite lack of trust as well as a lack of optimism concerning integration.)

The more Sarrazin is promoted in the media as the "savior" of Germany, the more German competitiveness will suffer as talent moves to friendlier shores.

Former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who was forced to resign over allegations that he had plagiarized other authors in his doctoral thesis, does not want a university review into the affair to be made public, according to reports in the German media.Friday's edition of the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said Guttenberg's lawyers would object on the grounds of breach of privacy if the university tried to publish its findings.

(Once again just look at the numbers: according to the communal project made available on the Internet, 94% of the pages in Guttenberg's dissertation contain copied fragments. 64% - or nearly two-thirds of the entire text was copied. Anyone can check that these numbers are not simply made up, click by click, source by source. That Guttenberg still insists that this did not occur intentionally is a measure of his chutzpah.)

Rather than using his legal team to try and suppress the truth - which is there for any and all to see anyway - Guttenberg would be better served by staying out of the headlines, and rehabilitating himself with some sort of philanthropic project.

April 10, 2011

April is National Poetry Month in the US, and this year I want to acknowledge the work of the German-American poet Lisel Mueller. Born in Hamburg in 1924, Lisel Neumann's family escaped certain death by the Nazis (her grandparents perished in the death camps) by fleeing to the United States. Lisel was 15 when she arrived on our shores. Her poems are in her adopted English and they often reflect a whimsical relationship with a second language. She writes with an intimate precision about her own life, but also finds inspiration in the lives of artists and writers, as well as in the midwestern landscape of her home in America. Mueller's poems are accessible to a wide audience, but also possess layers of meaning that call for frequent re-reading and reflection.

Lisel Mueller has always kept a strong bond with her native German language, and has translated into English the works of German women writers, especially the poetry of Marie Luise Kaschnitz. To my knowlegde, she is all but unknown in Germany, and none of her poems have appeared in German translation.

In the poem Curriculum Vitae, Lisel Mueller gives a brief sketch of her life, including how English became the "language of love" through the courtship with her future husband and how she was "hurt" into becoming a poet to express her grief after the death of her mother.

Curriculum Vitae

1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.

2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this.

3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.

4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.

5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.

7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes.

8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.

9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence.

10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness.

11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them.

12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love.

13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. The daughter became a mother of daughters.

14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present.

15) Years and years of this.

16) The children no longer children. An old man's pain, an old man's loneliness.

17) And then my father too disappeared.

18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public.

19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger than mine.

20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.

April 09, 2011

It's always interesting when Germany's greatest living philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, comments on current events. Habermas does not disappoint in his piece in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung - Merkels von Demoskopie geleiteter Opportunismus - wherein he criticizes the chancellor for bending to the prevailing populist winds rather than leading. Habermas has more than once commented on the creeping nationalism in Germany and the turning away from the project of the European Union. In particular, Habermas points to Merkels persistent support for the populuar Defence Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, long after it was apparent that he fraudulently earned his doctorate by plagiarizing his dissertation:

(In th past it was always possible to gain a coherent perspective in the policies of the federal governments: Adenauer was fixated on bonding with the west, Brandt on Ostpolitik and the Third World; Schmidt relativized the fate of small Europe from the perspective of the global economy, and Helmut Kohl wanted to tie national with European unification. The all wanted something else! True, Schröder was much more reactive than proactive but at least Joschka Fischer was pushing in the direction of European unity. But since 2005 the contours disolve completely. We no longer know what it's about; if it means anything beyond winning the next election.)

In the op/ed piece Habermas also accuses the media of being complicit in "Berlusconizing" public discourse - something that is even more pronounced in the US - rather than engaging in a rational exchange of ideas or proposals for change.